Saying critical things about the character of Donald Trump is like saying critical things about the filmography of Steven Seagal. There is no one to surprise, and it is hard to say anything original.
Few Europeans can have admired the character of Donald Trump. Quite apart from his politics, he represents everything about America that Europeans disdain: the coarseness, the tastelessness, the arrogance et cetera. (I remember snickering at caricatures of Trump in Doonesbury before he had even entered politics.)
Some of us have had a lingering sense of anti-anti-Trumpism pretty much directly in response to this. European leaders who speak eloquently and behave civilly while still relying on American power to underwrite their cultural and regulatory boondoggles seem repulsively pathetic. Right-wingers who wallow in aesthetics of conservatism while flinching from any sort of political action are exhaustingly tedious. If Trump can at least shake up a complacent system in which such people prosper, some of us have thought, he will at least have accomplished something.
Yet it looks increasingly plausible that Trump’s aggressive obnoxiousness will actually embolden them. There’s no clever-clever way of getting around it: the man has as much honour in his bulky frame as a jellyfish has bones. Anyone in his vicinity is going to suffer by association.
Trump’s latest insult was to sneer that non-American troops who served in Afghanistan “stayed a little back”. This ignobly underplays the sacrifices of thousands of coalition troops — including those of 457 Britons who died — and is being received with outrage online. Actually, I am not sure I have ever seen such bipartisan condemnation.
Something else that Trump said seemed almost worse, though. “We’ve never needed them,” he said, dismissively, of his NATO allies. Now, I actually agree that the US didn’t “need” NATO support in 2001. It didn’t need to embark on a foolish and destructive war in Afghanistan, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people before the Taliban simply took control again. But it certainly claimed to need a “worldwide coalition”. So, if anything, Trump should be apologetic rather than dismissive. He is sneering at people for not sacrificing enough for the sake of American hubris.
People who look to Trump to restore Western civilisation, or even the USA, should realise that he is a man with an ingroup of one
But, again, Trump is a man without honour. Anybody in the way of his ambitions, to him, is an enemy — and anything he says about an enemy is legitimate. Look at how he met the death of Rob Reiner with bizarre comments about his “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”. Even if he disliked Reiner — a dislike which would of course have been mutual — maintaining his silence on the brutal killing of a beloved film director would have been as easy as consuming a Big Mac. But Reiner had offended Trump’s ego and he felt compelled to do a little dance on his grave.
People who look to Trump to restore Western civilisation, or even the USA, should realise that he is a man with an ingroup of one. His cause is not Western or American greatness. It is the satisfaction of his ego. Other nations, and other people, will be treated favourably just as long as they are sycophantic — just as long, in other words, are they serving his ego. Was there any geopolitical sense in trying to bully Denmark and its allies over Greenland? None. But more collegial and effective diplomacy would not have made Trump feel like such a big man.
Alas, personality issues have deeply affected American politics. The problem is not just Trump’s dysfunctional personality — it is the fact that the kind of people who are prepared to be maximally sycophantic towards Trump are also liable to have dysfunctional personalities. Trump’s administration has been packed with egotists, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI, who have been more concerned with their social media strategies than with real work. It has sheltered people like Matt Gaetz, who seem to have more baggage than a travelling NFL team. It has enabled people who appear to have more of an interest in performative cruelty than in political effectiveness. These are the sort of guys and gals who are prepared to slobber at the feet of a man Fox News presenters are dangerously liable to call “Daddy”.
Again, Trump-bashing makes me feel a bit uncomfortable — not because it is undeserved but because it feels lazy. Criticising Trump, especially in Europe, feels about as bold and original as complimenting Shakespeare. It also makes one feel depressingly close to people who thought the US under a senile octogenarian was the height of democratic normality. Finally, it could distract from Trump sometimes being directionally right — e.g. it’s wrong to claim that Europe owes a massive debt to the US but it’s still true that it should stop relying on America.
But Shakespeare is great, however many people have said it, and Trump is morbidly dishonourable. The pathologies of his character are doing what I would once have thought was damn near impossible — giving the European political establishment a chance for good press. While it is true that his rise created space for more restrictionist and realist perspectives, meanwhile, it now looks as if such causes will be easier and easier to tar with the same brush as this thuggish president.
None of this means we have to obsess over Trump’s failings in the manner of the hosts of The Rest Is Politics. Quite the opposite. We should be having less to do with the US in general. We still have mutual economic and security interests, and that is not going to change whatever President Trump says. But Europeans who have dreamed about some sort of transatlantic Coalition of the Based — and I’m getting disconcerting memories of the ARC conference here — should abandon hope. MAGA will live and die with the whims of Donald Trump — a fascinating and extraordinary man, to be sure, but one so lacking in soul that he would rename the Tower of London Trump Tower and convert the Louvre into a casino if it made sense to him at the time.
